…And I plan to keep mining.
It has been a fun experience and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning how mining Vertcoin works. I have a gaming PC at home which has a pretty powerful graphics card, the Nvidia 1080Ti. Before I started mining I would turn this beast off to save money on my power bill. However, these days it runs 24/7 as I would save less money by turning it off.
Why start mining Vertcoin?
First of all, only try mining cryptocurrency if you either pay for your own electricity or have discussed this with however does. Mining can get expensive, especially if you have multiple graphics cards.
The reason why I started mining was pretty simple. Over the last year I had taken a greater interest in cryptocurrency and felt the itch to develop something. I had set up my own Bitcoin node and started making applications that would parse and analyse the blockchain. By the way, if you want to get more in depth there is a pretty awesome tutorial on how you can create your own blockchain and cryptocurrency with Go.
I moved from Bitcoin to Vertcoin as the blockchain is much smaller than the 160GB beast that Bitcoin has. It’s just easier to work with and more portable. Vertcoin also follows Bitcoin with implementations like Lightning that will speed up transactions and make them much cheaper. The main difference between Vertcoin and Bitcoin is Vertcoin’s ASIC resistance. Bitcoin is currently very hard to mine and requires an investment of at least a few thousands of dollars for specialized miners to get started. This is not something that the average person can buy. Vertcoin uses more memory heavy algorithms which makes it perfect for mining with a graphics card.
Of course this has also had some negative side effects as miners started buying every graphics card they could get their hands on. This has resulted in much higher prices and a lack of availability for PC gamers. I hope that this is a temporary side effect.
How much did I earn?
I have earned a total of 40 VTC as can be seen on my mining address here: VcMhEJrnYKNjTSrkazwJXgLHVRB5vKuouv. This is about $120 in todays value. Since I am living in Germany at the moment my electricity bill is a bit high but comes in at less than half of my rewards. I did this without mining full time, I paused my mining almost every day and played some games for an hour or two. I plan to keep my VTC to save them or use them to test future projects that I think of. I still have 3 days left before I have actually mined for a full month.
How do you mine Vertcoin?
I run a public node that can be seen here, anyone is free to mine on it http://185.201.144.162:9181/static/. I have also written a guide on how to mine VTC over at VTCPool.io.
The developers have made mining Vertcoin super easy, I run the One Click Miner on my Windows 10 PC without the need to configure anything.